


Devotional

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brotherly Love, Crisis of Faith, Curses, Episode: s10e18 Book of the Damned, Fire, Geography, Guilt, Kansas, Love, Mark of Cain, Men of Letters Bunker, Rivers, Season/Series 10, Spiritual, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-04-22
Packaged: 2018-03-25 02:29:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3793246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His prayers might burn down the prairie.</p>
<p>Or: Sam tries to walk it all off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devotional

 

 

It can't be read through these eyelashes, that’s for sure, the book or the weather. ( _Your eyes, boy, like pebbles turned up in the rain. Trade you for these coins.)_ Little voices speak to him out of the grass, startle him, but only for a second; locusts peel away from his wet boots, go like plagues into the pale sky. 

_Can't do it alone._ I can't do it alone, is what he thinks. The damned book (of curses, curse unlockings, undoings) is burning a hole in its box, and he walks.

He walks, has been walking, often at dawn, sometimes at dusk, in the wild places close to home, outside the bunker door. Knife in boot, wards and words at the ready, but open, open, hands itching to fold.

That’s the thing, a prayer, the right kind: folded hands, knees in dirt, exhaust and moth wings off the lights outside a gas station in Topeka shucked from his shoulders, enough evidence to convict him of a life: give it all up, set it off, start all over in the blackness of the burnt.

Dean’s arm holds it, that scorching, a war in heaven and in hell and on earth.

*****

The prairie is a cup. The bunker’s a trap, a catch, a holding, the place where they put their feet up, where they drink coffee and eat eggs and pretend to be, well, what they always pretend to be, home.

“Dude, where’ve you been?” Dean says from the table.

“Why’re you up?”

"No rest, you know.” His raised hand, smirk, say the rest.

“Yeah.”

“You want coffee?”

Dean’s pale, for him truly; color of early larkspur in the next county, catclaw-violet about the eyes.

“Are you sick?”

“You got a question for all my questions?”

Sam looks him over, stamps the grass from his boots, scents the burnt roast, goes to the shower for cleansing, something.

*****

_Trespasser_ , the water whispers, _failer, ruiner, abomination._

Those days might be over but the hissing’s still there; maybe will be always.

He holds his palms out, supplicant, under the steam, steps out, goes to stare (naked) in secret at the book, thinks, what if it’s cursed, medieval book curse, curse on top of curse: _he who absconds with these words erase his name from the earth his seed his kin all memories all traces of him may his line be consumed in fire._

That would be their luck.

*****

Next morning he sights a horned lark, little Lucifer, rising from the grass, spots a long-stalked crane, a lone goose far from home. Thinks about prairie burns and pleurisy root, infernal chaos, pneumonia, cryptology, steganography, shades, sendings.

The air’s sharp, sky a brighter gray, the itch in his palms intolerable.

(Infernal, from _infernus,_ below, underground; hell and the bunker. Men of Letters file: secret and without number, _Book of the Damned._ )

All the abandonments and betrayals and here he is, looking for another, an undoing.

Here they are waiting, stiffening like wind in their own hands.

Try again:

_Make me a beacon_

_A spark_

_A vessel but only for…_

_For what._

*****

This is the book that isn’t, that cannot, should not be.

Do not open me.

*****

It’s always too late with them, and then they have to backtrack, fold the map on itself, fold and then deal.

“Sam,” Dean says, when he comes home again (mud-chunks dropping from his boots, prairie chicken-feather in his pocket), holds his palms out in an eternal  _what gives._

“Went for a walk, like I always do. Chill, OK?”

Dean looks transparent, red-eyed, sleeve resting lightly on the burn.

They were two little kids once, clutching each other’s hands in a country church in Indiana, last vestiges.

_A Child’s Book of Devotions_ , Sam remembers, something like, little prayerbook printed for cheap, tossed out like confetti, Dean whispering _baby_ into his hair, not something he would have said, done, for much longer.

But he must have whispered it like a psalm, balm for two born orphans bound for the flaming horizon.

No me without you, Sam almost says, but maybe there’s a you without  me.

*****

The whole earth is marked, tattooed.

The prairie is expert in scars, in divots, in hoofmarks, mousefeet, vole trails. There are killdeer, hawks on the wind, track and sign wherever you look.

It’s dawn again and Sam thinks: there are ley lines from the 100-Mile to the Gold Coast, older paths than any they’ve walked.

He could follow them to their sources, reach into a Kansas cottonwood and pull out the roots, pull out the twined roots and separate, fiber from fiber, begin again in the smoke of the spring burns.

Here they are, markers themselves, dead center of the lower 48 and there are still places in America where people sing the gospel on porches every night, shout hymn and revival, where there are other faiths than inverse despair.

He walks, exhausts his ankle-bones, drives into town for groceries, rubbing his palms on the wheel where he dares.

*****

“Sammy”, Dean says, all the time now, “where’re you going?”

_I can’t pray here._

“Why do you want to know?”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Throw me a question for a question, you know what I mean. Just stop.”

“For a walk,” Sam says, “where I always go.”

_I can’t pray here._

Dean looks at him charged, quiet, takes a pull on his bottle, sets it, wet clink, on the table.

“Make sure you’re armed.”

*****

Death walks with him in the dusk and he knows it’s not real.

“I know what you’re doing.”

“No you don’t.”

“It’s not some cosmic bee-sting, Sam.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t think you do, my boy.”

Death’s walked these grasslands before, of course. Whole flyovers of reapers too, like flocks of cranes or snow geese or something darker, crows; he’d say murders but that would be obvious: serials, winter suicides, death by thresher,silo, coveting neighbors’ wives and flipped pickups and Saturday night train tracks and stampedes; arson, tornado, long wind-sent illness, demon, ghost, monster. It’s all here, a litany.

To ask, if you might: O Death, how do you kill the oldest anger in the world, the oldest, deadliest wrath, the ur-wrath, the war, the eternal what-is.

Wash it clean with with earth, with air, with water, with fire.

*****

He rolls in and slips past doors and stumbles softly to bed, dreams of _compositae_ , roots and seeds, the secret afflictions and healings of the prairie, birds with horns and an are-you-listening. A river where it begins, where it might end, with a thousand burnt houses and a surrender. Magic to blank it all out, butterflies lifting from a battlefield of charred grass, everything swept clean, and them, sentinel species after all, coming up anew.

*****

“Sammy,” Dean says in the morning, “shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything yet.”

Dean’s head’s in his hands, then up again, eyes bleary, headache etched there in burnt umber.

“I’ll make you some…”

“Thanks,” Dean says, raises a mug, “got hair of the dog.” 

Sam sits, takes a sip, thinks of all the times his brother's hands have done something other than deal death, support and lift and stop and save, wrist cold over his hot forehead, warm across his wet back, bracing him like a young tree, holding him up.

*****

He loses time in the files, watches Dean putter, nap, try for lunch and dinner, slips outside again.

Castiel paces him for a time in the pink dusk, in a dream of tallgrass far from here; probably not real, either.

“You’re not praying to me, are you?”

“I’m not praying at all, Cas.”

“Yes you are.”

“OK, I'm trying.”

“You’re not planning to do something unwise, are you?”

“No. Just need some time.”

“As you wish.”

He’s alone. Blades stroke his calves; his eyes water and spill; he goes to his knees in a marshy place, stays awhile.

*****

Dean looks cross-eyed at his muddy jeans when he gets home.

“You fall or something?”

“Um. Yeah. Slipped on a rock.”

“You hurt?”

“Don’t think so.”

He swallows hard.

Dean looks at him, and there’s the suspicion, olivine, familiar.

“Something weird here, on the laptop, if you’re interested.”

“Let me clean up,” he says,“I’ll just…”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “OK.”

*****

Under the water he thinks about rivers tailed to their sources, swallowing their own tails.

The Kaw, dipping through the old hometown, banks draped in heal-all; later a firestream slipping from grass to tree, torching and crowning, the ground burnt Bible-black, flame licking up his arms the way it did after the hellhound, the saved soul, the abandoned church, more than two years now.

Confess, pilgrim. Give me your sin.

It’s more than two hundred miles from Lebanon to Lawrence, and his feet are so tired.

“You alright in there?” Dean says outside the bathroom door.

“Yeah,” he calls, “be right out.”

*****

I am the way, says the book.

Do not open me.

*****

There’s no devotion that fits, but one.

Try this: _Make me an instrument of your peace_.

Hear this: Dean shouting, _you should have burnt it why didn’t you burn it, that damned book, I told you to burn it._

_Let me be your comfort_.  

Prayers cobbled up, floating to the surface, detritus, little hitches, short breaths.

_Make of me your—_

Think: _I’d have to never have been. For this not to happen, I’d have to never have been._

_I will fear no evil I will fear no evil_ _I will fear no evil._

That’s one of his favorites, always has been.

*

Go to bed, gun-pillowed.

Blink awake. Get up; dawn just beginning to hum.

Down the hall, just leaning a little, just listening. Crack the door and listen to your brother breathe, raspy, a little sick maybe, a lot soul-sick, anticipation of nightmare; watch his ribs rise like the hill country.

Think about all the burnt houses, the burnt bones.

Put your hands flat to the door and then fold them, creep in, set palms softly to the end of the bed and stop, think of a book made of skin, Dean a cyclone on the skin of the prairie, rivers rushing to the state’s center, back out again.

_Brother we need to go home, to where we began._

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Friends of the Kaw, the Kansas River](http://kansasriver.org/)   
>  [Kansas prairie](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossaroni/3688176677/?rb=1>geographic%20center%20of%20the%20US,%20Lebanon,%20Kansas</a>%0A%0A<a%20href=)   
>  [Horned lark](http://magnusonkimball.photoshelter.com/image/I0000WnZIB4_whGI)   
>  [Sandhill crane](http://kdwpt.state.ks.us/news/Hunting/Migratory-Birds/Sandhill-Crane)
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>  "The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” --Willa Cather


End file.
